


The Choice of Life

by Anna_Wing



Series: The Road Goes Ever On [4]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 21:54:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1618364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna_Wing/pseuds/Anna_Wing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Maglor decides to do something different with his life after the War of Wrath. Sequel to "Before Thangorodrim:The Last Fall of Himring Hill".</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Choice of Life

He wandered under a cloudy sky, in an alien garden of geometrically laid out rivulets and precisely planted flowers. Foreign fruits hung from the trees, pecked at by unfamiliar birds. Strange scents, not all pleasant, hung in the warm, damp air. Mysterious, but quite interesting. He was pleased to be there, though it would have been better for some company, for he was alone. Time passed.

After a while he realised that he was lying on his back looking at an ornate carpet suspended above him. A little later he realised that it was a roof of a tent, a very large one. Then he remembered who he was and what he had been doing before the world went away.

He did not move, or blink, or change the even rhythm of his breathing. He was neither hungry nor thirsty, nor did he feel any pain from the arrow-scratch along his left arm. There was a pillow under his head, and he was lying on what felt like a thin mattress supported by a woven structure. It had not been made for his kind; his feet were supported by some other surface, abutting the first at its far end. The light was dim and flickering slightly; oil lamps. There were at least two people nearby, Men, neither very large in size. From the voices and the smell, there were many more Men outside, no great distance away. His clothes were clean and his, though he did not feel his weapons anywhere near him. His feet were bare and his arms were drawn above his head and chained together at the wrists to something behind him.

“Ah,” a woman said in Sindarin from somewhere to his left. “Good afternoon.” 

It had been several lifetimes of Men since he had last heard that harsh accent, but he did not forget voices. He turned his head towards her, disdaining to hide. An Easterling woman sat in a folding chair some distance away, watching him. She was neither young nor old. Her black hair was drawn back and coiled in a bun at the back of her head. She wore black trousers tucked into black felt boots and a long coat of deep purple, embroidered with a dragon in black and silver across its breast. From the way it fell, there was mail beneath. A folding table of some dark, unfamiliar wood supported a teapot and two cups of misshapen clay next to her chair. A sword sheathed in poplar and a recurved bow of mulberry wood hung from a tent-pole behind; sheath and bow were finely polished and inlaid in gold wire with a delicate pattern of flowers, but the hilt of the sword was worn and plain. 

The tent was carpeted and lined with woven rugs in intricate designs of many colours. Its fabric was supported on at least a dozen slim poles. From his restricted position he could not see all of its interior, but the echo of Noldorin customs was unmistakeable. The furniture, the crockery, even the weaving of the rugs, all were clearly crude copies of his people’s ways. It was disconcerting and offensive.

“Himring,” he said. “You were Morgoth’s captain of Himring. The Grandmother of the East.”

The woman smiled faintly, though it did not lend her round, sallow-skinned face any look of kindness.

“ Yes. I was. I am. I am also surprised to meet you here, Singer. Surely the Herald rounded up all the strays of Aman before he returned home with his triumph and his shiny pebbles?”

The Silmarils. He remembered the biting agony against his hand. Worse than coals or ice or thorns had been the knowledge that his father’s Jewel knew him, and rejected him. His scarred hand spasmed involuntarily. Laughter flickered in her dark eyes.

“Or are you also a fugitive from the victors of that war?”

Maglor looked away, back at the woven garden. It no longer offered refuge. There was a little scrape of sound as she came to her feet and trod heavily across the carpets to him. Let her come nearer...His foot, unwisely left loose, lashed out and up for a blow at her throat that would leave her stunned and choking on the carpets. He was already twisting in his chains to deliver the finishing strike.

Except that nothing moved at all. His flesh remained as inert as unworked clay. He tried to move his legs, his arms, his hands, and found himself unable, with less command over his own flesh than the least of mortals.

He gasped, “Demon, what have you done?” and then found his voice also paralysed.

“Be civil,” she said, looking down at him. “Or I will take your voice as well as your flesh. I am Innin Adili. You may call me ‘Lady’.”

The left sleeve of his shirt was torn. The demon folded the tatters back and ran her finger along Maglor’s upper arm, following the arrow’s path. 

He remembered it grazing him in the melee, one lone Noldo and a few dozen stray Men trapped on the rocky outcrop in the sea of grass while the crows circled overhead, waiting. The Orcs had been taunting the fugitives, playing with the stragglers that they had re-captured, waiting for nightfall and the end of the game. Until the riders came, five hundred Easterlings on tall, golden horses, their arrows cutting down both Orcs and their screaming prey. 

Even so it had been a close thing, for there were over eight dozen of the beasts, of the large, warrior kind, and they had fought back viciously. Easterlings were dragged to the ground and slain, their beautiful horses eviscerated. The Orcs too had bows, and used them. In the end though, the riders simply circled the beasts, shooting until all were fallen. A handful of Orcs had tried for the fugitives despite the arrows, for spite perhaps. He remembered having slain them without difficulty, weary though he was. He had assumed the arrow to have been an accident, though the shallow wound had burned with a peculiar fire.

Maglor tried to speak, and felt it when she allowed him to do so.

“Poison,” he said. “Poison on the arrowhead.”

The demon nodded, unsmiling. “In a manner of speaking.”

She reached above him and he could not even flinch; the chains fell from his wrists with a muffled clink. Without his willing it, his arms came down to lie at his sides, and he sat up and swung his feet to the ground. The demon returned to her chair and sat down.

“You see? I can command your flesh. It costs me some effort and a great deal of tedium, and I have other things to occupy me. So either you may conduct yourself with decorum, or I can have you loaded with enough chains that you cannot move anyway. Which will you have? If you do not behave civilly, I will stop your heart.”

Maglor stared at her in horror and rage, hardly hearing her. The obscenity of this imprisonment in his own body silenced him utterly. He knew well that flesh and spirit could be severed and the flesh turned to foul uses; but never, never had the Enemy held this power, to bind the flesh with the spirit still within.

The creature waited, watching him with an oddly familiar expression. Maglor realised suddenly what it was and where he had seen it before: on Celegorm’s face when prey evaded him for too long, on Curufin’s when a device refused to function as he intended it to, on Caranthir’s whenever the world proved other than to his liking; even on his patient eldest brother’s, at yet another meeting of the argumentative lords of Beleriand. He sat helpless, stricken by memory.

She looked past him and said something in the Easterlings’ many-toned tongue, and a young Easterling woman came out from behind his cot. She was unarmed and unarmoured, dressed in a plain robe of dark violet, with a coiled dragon embroidered in silver at her right shoulder. She bowed to the demon, and filled a cup from the pot. But instead of offering it to her, she went to Maglor and held it out to him in both hands. He lifted his hand without thinking, and discovered that he could. The girl’s eyes were as dark as her mistress’ and as cold. She stood still, offering him the cup. He hesitated, hand poised, irresolute.

“It’s tea,” the demon said. She sounded slightly bored. “Rishuk.” The girl lifted the cup to her lips, her black stare never leaving Maglor’s face, and sipped the smallest possible sip. Then she offered him the cup again. It steamed gently in the cool air of the tent. Its scent was a little astringent, but clean and wholesome. He took it, careful not to touch her fingers. She bowed to him, and withdrew to her mistress’ shoulder.

The demon poured herself tea, and sipped. Maglor turned his cup, watching the almost imperceptible swirl of pale liquid. It seemed a poor thing at first, clumsy, of rough clay and a dark, uneven glaze. Then he noted the depth of its colour and the fineness of its balance in his hand and understood that it was beautiful, in its own alien fashion. He drank, discovering that he was thirsty after all. There was no taint to the tea that he could discern. The woman (Rishuk? A name or merely an order?) brought the pot to him and refilled his cup. He nodded his thanks and drank again. The woman took his cup and went away into the shadows.

“What do you want from me?” he asked at last. 

The demon drank her tea and did not answer. The woman came back with his boots, cleaned and repaired, and a pair of socks (1), which she set down at his feet. He put them on, since it seemed the logical thing to do. His left hand was stiff, as usual after long sleep, but worked well enough for the purpose. The socks were new and fit his feet perfectly. The demon set her empty cup down and stood. Her servant went to the door-opening and lifted the flap. A gong sounded outside, and there was a shuffle of feet on carpets.

“Come with me,” the demon said and stalked through the opening, leaving him to follow or not at her back. He did so, for lack of ideas of what else to do in this very peculiar situation. Beyond the door-flap was another lamplit, carpet-walled room, this one an antechamber with an opening to the outside world. It held a dozen Easterling men and women, all heavily armed. Clearly the demon’s personal guards. There were also three older women and an older man, in robes like the young woman’s but more elaborately embroidered. All four bowed to the demon and one of the women asked what sounded like a question. The demon answered briefly and gestured at Maglor, who found himself the focus of twelve and four pairs of wary, curious eyes. There was something odd about their faces, beyond the familiar strangeness of their race. After a moment, he realised that it was the absence of fear.

“They have forgotten your kind,” the demon said softly, in Sindarin. “What they will know of you, you will show them or I will tell them after you are dead. Come, walk with me.”

The guards formed a loose square about the demon, her counsellors and Maglor. Somehow he wound up on her left, at her side. The gong was sounded twice, the outer door-flap was lifted and they went out. He looked around, taking a deep breath of the chill, autumnal air. The Men about him wore felt and leather against a strong, steady breeze, pleasantly cool on his skin and in his hair. It was afternoon, nearing the evening of the shortening day. The sky was a clear blue, pale and cloudless.

The demon’s pavilion stood in an open circle of space, a brightly-coloured patchwork island in a chaotic sea of round, felt-sided tents, with many, many slight, dark-haired Men going about their mysterious business among them. The smell and the noise were suddenly overwhelming: a powerful fog of cooking, latrines, horses, wool, metal, leather, vinegar, grass, dung fires, unwashed Men, the roar of voices, and the jingle of discordant music and wailing song from several different places. He had wandered _yéni_ alone, since the drowning of Beleriand, and not since the last field before the peaks of Thangorodrim had he walked among such crowds of the Secondborn. And there he had killed as he went.

“Be at ease,” the demon said, and he felt his heartbeat slow, felt calm fall like a blanket over his senses, all that he could have done himself had he been master of his own flesh. He breathed again, nose twitching at the ephemeral mortal effluvium. The ground was solid beneath his feet, alive with the small life of Yavanna’s most enduring creations. Even on the ashy waste of the Anfauglith where no green thing could grow, the life of the soil had continued deep below, until the Sea drowned it. He could see water in the distance, shining in the low sunlight beyond the tents. The wind blew cleanly. This was a healthy land, untainted by the Dark.

“Come,” the demon said. “We will go down to the lake. It may be easier for you there.” 

She strode off and her retinue trotted hastily about her. Maglor’s longer stride let him stroll at her side, and the slower pace showed him the subtle order of the camp, where his first impression had been of anarchy. The Men were many, but it struck him that they were, almost all, young even among their kind. There were a few older ones, the swift withering of mortality showing on their faces, but not many. There were males and females in equal number, but they did not share tents and they seemed to inhabit separate quarters of the camp. As the demon and her company passed by they stood and bowed, hands crossed at the breast, with reverence but no fear. A few approached her and offered shy words before returning to their tasks. 

“This is not an army,” he said in Sindarin, watching this time for the subtle signs that would tell him who understood. There. Two of the guards and one of the counsellors. Interesting. The demon said in the same tongue, “This is the Great Autumn Hunt. Each year my lords send me their children new come of age and they ride with me across the Sea of Grass and learn again what we were and shall be still, in our hearts.”

He thought about that, recalling that last skirmish. There had been some in battle armour, but indeed the most of them had only worn hunting coats of light leather. He wondered whether he should be embarrassed at having been rescued by children and decided that there was no need, since he might yet not survive the day. He walked on, listening. Their speech was no more than a jumble of syllables at first, but a master of tongues does not cease to be so and he began to hear theirs as they spoke, almost without willing it.

A sharp, vinegar reek attacked his sensitive nose, distracting him from linguistic analysis ( _agglutinative, syllabic, object-subject-verb, at least five tones and three glottal stops, case endings?_ ). He looked up, and relaxed into ready stance without thinking, hands reaching for weapons that were not there. The guards smiled, and one of the female counsellors patted his arm and said something clearly meant to be soothing. He glanced at the demon, but there was no bite to the amusement in her face. The Orcs that had startled him stood stiffly in a cleared space among the tents, attitudes menacing, weapons raised. The stench came from their discoloured flesh, perfectly preserved, the mortal wounds repaired and concealed under mended armour. Three men in long leather aprons emerged from a large tent nearby, from which many other peculiar smells emanated, and made rapid, bobbing obeisance. One of them babbled something in a cheerful tone, gesturing at the preserved beasts. The demon nodded in an approving way and said something that made them all beam.

“They will be sent to my cities,” the demon said. “The memories of Men are short, and my people must be reminded from time to time who the enemy is.”

Maglor could not disagree with that. He was familiar with the vagaries of mortal recollection. Less than a mortal lifetime after the drowning of Beleriand, and Melian was a crone cackling over bones in a forest cave and Luthien a sorceress who lured her lovers up the ladder of her hair and flung them to their deaths when she was done with them. Maedhros had become a demon who dyed his hair red with mortal blood and Thingol a deformed dwarf brooding over treasure under his hill (that one had been amusing). Maglor himself had been obliged to interrupt his Eastward wanderings to slaughter a Mannish village that had taken to sacrificing travellers to Eonwë. 

“You hold Orcs your foe?” He tried very hard to keep his voice non-committal.

“Of course,” the demon said, rather haughtily. He was fairly sure that this was mockery. “I lead _Men_.” 

They inspected the stuffed beasts, accompanied by what sounded like highly technical explanations from the taxidermists, mixed with jests from the guards and the occasional comment from the demon. 

“The Orcs,” he said. In Quenya. The hesitation before she answered in the same tongue was too short for a mortal to have marked it.

“What of them?” Her accent in Quenya was as harsh as her Sindarin.

He gestured to the largest of the beasts. Its tough hide was a peculiar grey-green shade, a result of the preservation process, no doubt, and its eye sockets were empty, probably to be filled later with glass. It smelt like one of Curufin’s workshops on a particularly experimental day.

“Where do they come from? Who...directs them?”

“Ah.” The demon glanced westwards. “That question...I also would like answered.”

Curufin had dissected them. There had been a short but vicious argument about whether he could do it while they were still alive. Maedhros had kept aloof, in case his casting vote should be needed, though Maglor had suspected without daring to ask, that he truly had not cared, one way or the other. Maglor himself...had been willing. But the hunters, Celegorm and the twins, and grim Caranthir had been solidly against it, and Curufin had yielded to his brothers’ wills. He had not learned much from the dead. They were not significantly different from Men or even Elves in internal structure, though he remembered the long, technical arguments between Celegorm and Caranthir about muscle density and metabolic efficiency.

He said, “We thought, when Morgoth fell and Sauron was summoned to Valinor, that they would fade and fail, lacking the wills of their makers to impel their generations onwards.”

The demon said in a thoughtful tone, “Melkor is gone from Arda, though his Song is woven through its substance still. Sauron....I do not know. But I remember, lifetimes ago as we came homeward again, hearing a hint of something sour in the Music, near the great inland Sea in the West...but it was far and faint, and I had other matters to concern me, then and since.”

She smiled a little, contemplating the dead Orcs and he suppressed a shiver. Just so had he seen Yavanna smile in Aman, pleased at the work of Her hands. “The Herald might have summoned him, but I cannot imagine that he would have gone. Not he. Bow to the Valar and admit that he had done wrong? Never. He was a fool and ever will be, but both pride and fear ruled him always.”

“And you?” he asked without trying to stop himself. “What rules you?”

Her smile broadened. “I have my purposes here in Middle-earth,” she said. “They are not yet accomplished. They may never be accomplished. But I will strive to achieve them howsoever I may.”

She turned away and he followed, disquieted. They passed along paths of faded grass beaten flat by the passage of many feet. The camp had obviously not been there for long. Maglor glanced at the position of the sun in the sky and calculated that he been unconscious for perhaps three days, no more. 

The demon said in Quenya, as if to herself, as they walked, “I have thought upon who might remain of the Captains of Angband, since the fall of Thangorodrim. Not many. Sauron himself, almost certainly, but he hides, as always. Of the Valaraukar, Gothmog is dead, and Lungorthin, and Angariën the Brave. Ngauros sleeps deep, beneath the Western mountains, and Ngaureth his sister also, far in the south, under the great ice where no Men dwell (2). Of the lesser kindred, the Orc-formed, all perished that I know of, and the Flyers also. A few remain of the Wolf Lords, but their generations are no longer than those of Men, and they dwindle apace, washed away among the blood of true wolves. The Dragons thrive, in their fashion, but they care for nothing but the hoarding of baubles and they will eat Orcs as readily as anything else.” 

“And you, here in the East.”

“And I. Sauron will not come where I rule, and nor will any lesser lord.”

They were moving in a slow, outward spiral, he realised, on what was clearly a regular tour of inspection. From the way her Men peered at him with open curiosity, the demon was also showing him to them. And perhaps, them to him. This particular servant of darkness was not trying to be subtle about seducing him. He almost felt grateful. 

An excited chattering in a different but still familiar tongue struck his ears. An older Easterling woman approached, shooing before her some two dozen men and women of different kind, the survivors of the knoll. The guards gave way, and Maglor was surrounded by a mass of enthusiastic Secondborn, all talking at once. He responded as gently as he could, giving back smile and touch and reassurance as he would to nervous hounds. They had been well cared for, their wounds treated, their garments not new but clean and sound. Their faces were still marked with the remnants of shock and sorrow, but he could sense no present fear on them, only relief and weariness. They did not think themselves among enemies. After what felt like a long time but was probably not, their shepherdess gathered them and took them away among the tents.

He glanced at the demon.

“I was most impressed by their accounts,” she said, straight-faced. “Apparently you killed a hundred Orcs single-handed, rescued their entire village and brought them over the border just in time to meet us.”

Men. “It was three dozen at most,” he said. “And by the time I got there, there was not much of the village left to rescue. Also, I had nothing to do with your coming.”

“No,” she agreed. “ That was someone else.” She looked around, and whistled a peculiar, familiar, up-and-down sequence of notes. There was a harsh croak , and the biggest raven Maglor had ever seen came flapping over the tents towards them. He put his arm up without thinking, and the great bird landed neatly on his forearm. The guards made admiring noises and moved away from him.

“Cärc,” he said, “Greetings, Lord of Ravens. Well met.” The raven made a little purring sound in response, and he scratched it gently on its nape, remembering. “I thought that you had gone home with Eonwë.” The raven made a noise like a sneeze, its version of laughter.

“He and I are acquainted, from very long ago,” the demon said. “And we have always maintained...civil relations. When you came into the North again he noticed, and his people kept an eye out, for old times’ sake. He was rather fond of your brother and you.”

Maglor smoothed the soft feathers gently, mindful of the mighty beak. “We fed him and his well enough.”

“Indeed. And so chance had it, so to speak, that he was in the neighbourhood when you had your little adventure with the Orcs, and further chance had it that I was also nearby for him to call upon.”

Chance. He knew his cousin Finrod’s theories, as had everyone in Beleriand during the days of the Leaguer, and he knew how unexpected eddies in the Song could move lives and deaths, but he found it very hard indeed to believe that the Valar were troubling Themselves to manipulate events in his vicinity, let alone for his benefit. Assuming that all of this would end to this benefit. He did not believe that either.

She must have perceived his scepticism, though he was certain that his thought did not show upon his face. 

“I had nothing to do with it, and the Raven Lord is fairly sure that he had nothing to do with it, but we are very small voices in the Song, compared to our...Western kin. We are, nonetheless, pleased by your presence and your survival up to now.”

She smiled that smile again, and they walked on. The Raven Lord sidled up Maglor’s arm to his shoulder and settled himself there, chewing meditatively on a few strands of Maglor’s hair. It was, fortunately, not the season for nest-building.

“What will become of those folk?” he asked, unwillingly accepting that much responsibility for their well-being.

“They will be well enough. I have been sending my own people here over the last generation or two, to settle this frontier and hold it secure. They will have land for pasture and tillage, homes to dwell in, tools and beasts and the company of their own kind. And in exchange, in every generation they will give one or two of their sons and daughters to my armies, to fight if they must and die if they must, for the peace of my people and my lands.”

It sounded...reasonable, in mortal terms. The Grandmother of the East, he remembered, had been careful for her own. Had parleyed for their safety and made sure to have them well away before she struck at Himring and the Host of the Noldor. A mortal Queen could have done no more.

They were at an edge of the camp, the Sea of Grass rolling away from them west and south and east. He saw the sentries in the distance; these were Men of full age in battle armour. They rode the horses he remembered from Beleriand, the tough, ugly, enduring mounts of the wild East. And then the wind shifted and he looked whence it came, for it carried the unmistakeable smell of suffering.

The demon did not check her stride. “Come,” she said. “This you must see also.”  
Ground had been marked out south of the camp. From the butts and other equipment set here and there it was a practice ground of sorts, for archery and other exercises. A group of young Men, both male and female, was gathered at one end, shooting at a target. It was from the target that the smell came, for it lived. A young Man, naked, and bound spreadeagled to two long poles set crosswise. He was silent, but feathered shafts stood forth from his straining flesh, and fear and pain and exhaustion marked him. Maglor stopped, without his will, and found himself unable to move further, or speak. The Lord of Ravens shifted awkwardly on his shoulder and leapt away upwards in a clatter of wings. 

“That is the Khawmu heir,” the demon said in Sindarin, without expression. “A promising youth in many ways, but he showed cowardice in the events of your rescue. This is not permitted among my lords and the children of my lords, who will be lords in their turn and defenders of my people. They may not be cowards, they may not be fools. If he lives until sunset, his honour will be cleaned and he will return among his riding unstained. If he dies, his honour will be cleaned and his kin will know that he died bravely.”

Maglor tried to speak and found that he could. “The others...”

“His riding, whose honour also has been injured by his failure.” The faces of the young archers were grim and unhappy. They also suffered from this barbarity. Even as he watched, one of the archers, a young male, lifted his bow slowly and loosed an arrow: light and barbless, not a heavy point meant to kill, but still deadly in the wrong place. It struck the outer side of the boy’s thigh. He gasped, a soft half-scream of pain choked back, and shuddered in his bonds.

Maglor strained every muscle to move, in vain.

“This is the price of lordship among my people, Son of Fëanor,” the demon said, with no change in her voice . “All pay it, even the highest among them, if they fail from what they must be, to rule.”

He shuddered with horror. And yet, unwillingly, he could see that this too had reason and purpose behind it; it was not done merely for pleasure in another’s suffering. He saw none in the demon, or her counsellors, or the guards. He could not say that it was unjust that lordship should be paid for in one’s own pain, one’s own endurance, one’s own blood. He could not say anything at all, and not only because the demon’s spell had taken all command of his own flesh from him.

“We must leave here,” the demon said. “It is the business of the riding and not proper for others to witness, even me. But you had to see.”

He realised that unlike every other encounter so far, these young Men had not bowed to her or greeted her or acknowledged her in any way. All their attention was on the terrible rite that they enacted.

The demon turned away, with her people. His flesh was his own again, and he followed. It was late afternoon, hurrying on to the early autumn sunset amd the wind was strengthening. The air would be cold, for a mortal. That alone, with shock and injury and blood-loss, might kill a Man, especially a young one, not yet come into its full strength.

They walked northwards, skirting the camp, passing corrals full of horses, both the beautiful golden kind that the lords rode and the stocky, common sort. The lake lay before them, long and reed-edged. On its far shore the hills began, rising craggy and pine-clad almost from the water’s edge. The demon gestured to her entourage, which fell behind, guards and counsellors both, leaving Maglor to walk with her down a long, grassy slope still sweet with the last, fading flowers.

In the shelter of the slope the wind eased, and the water rippled gently, bright as polished bronze in the light of the low sun. The demon moved away from him and sat down cross-legged on the flat, grassy brink. A wave of her hand indicated that he should join her. After a moment he did so, a wary distance away. She sat still, gazing out over the grey-golden water. A little breeze sprang up, rippling its smooth surface. Along the shore a bird cried whoop-whoop-whoop among the reeds, and a small flock of swans dabbled off-shore, well out of range of arrows.

There was silence between them, for a while. Not peace, though this was a peaceful place. He could still hear the noise of the camp, but it was muted and distant. The sound of arrows hitting their target was lost altogether, even to his keen ears. Maglor waited, in silence but not in peace, for whatever would come next.

“You are not the first of the Eldar to come here,” the demon said at last, still looking out towards the distant hills. “The world has changed greatly since then, but these lands, more or less, are where the Firstborn had their beginning. Those hills and woods before us are where Men first met the Avari, coming up from Hildorién in the far south. And some hundred leagues east of here lies a long lake, deep and cold, surrounded by mountains and forest; like Helevorn of old, in Beleriand, though greater by far. And that was Cuiviénen once, or part of it. One of your people dwells there, a singer and a piper, who lives alone and makes music only of sorrow. He is mad, I think. My people know him as a legend, the singer in the forests. They fear him, for his song is too terrible and too fair for mortals to endure.”

His interest caught despite himself, Maglor said, “Daeron, surely. So that is where he fled.” That tale had spread through Beleriand swifter than arrows, in the years after Luthién’s great raid upon Angband, and her greater one upon the very Halls of the Dead. Even the Dwarves had heard it, in their great cities under the mountains, and muttered into their long beards with respect and envy. They understood both daring and the Jewel-lust, none better. 

The demon said, “So it seems. Is that what you wish to do in Middle-earth? Sing and pine for what is done and dead and will never be again?”

“What is done cannot be undone.” he said, sure of that if of nothing else. “What is it that you want of me?”

The far hills burned brighter as the Sun sank towards them, but the waters at their feet darkened. The demon said, “I do not live here. My cities are in the South and East, on the great river plains beside the Sunrise Sea.”

“I made promises to my people when we left the Field of Ash. I have tried to keep them. They are a great people now. Their cities are many and strong, they live as well as I can contrive within their limitations. And mine. I have not Aulë’s arts and those are what they need.”

Of all things, he had not expected something like this. He hoped that he did not appear too foolishly astonished.

“You wish me to...”

“Teach them, yes. Anything you wish, so long as it makes them...more than they are now.”

The Eldar were not usually excitable in the manner of Men, who lacked the power to control their own flesh. His house, in particular, knew well the cost of any failure of self-mastery. But he felt rather Mannish at that moment. Mad images rose in his mind of Morgoth demanding that his prisoners instruct Orcs, Wargs and vampire bats in the finer points of the scientific method. Then he thought of the captives of Himring in the days when the demon had ruled there, and realised that she must have exacted such service from them also.

She was saying, “In return, I will make you mighty among my people, second only to myself, for as long as it pleases you to stay among us.”

“I cannot,” he said, and waited for death.

The demon blinked.

“Why not?” 

She seemed honestly surprised. Maglor looked down at her. She was so close; within range of his hands if he could use them. He thought of trying, but did not.

“I cannot serve you as a slave.”

She frowned. “That is not what I offer.”

“It is. For so long as you hold this power over me, to move my flesh against my own will.”

Her frown eased. 

“Oh, that.” The demon turned to look him in the face and said, “It is a temporary phenomenon.”

He had not felt such relief since the Battle of Sudden Flame, when he had brought his people to Himring through Orcs and dragon-fire and the breaking of the mountains, and found it still standing and his brother still alive.

“Really,” he managed to say, with a semblance of calm.

“Indeed,” the demon said. “I will explain.” In much the same manner had Curufin expounded happily upon some new mystery of Middle-earth to his brothers. As with Curufin, he settled himself to listen, knowing that the information would be conveyed, like it or not.

“Flesh is the gateway to spirit. The mastery that I have established over your flesh may be said to be of like nature, though obviously not of like strength, to the union between spouses, among the Eldar.” Her upraised hand silenced his shock.

“It is not the same, not remotely, but it is more like than anything else.” She eyed his unhidden horror with a certain sardonic blandness. “You have nothing to fear from me in that direction, I assure you. I am not Melkor or Melian. And to bind you for more than a space would require rather more effort and will, on your part and mine, than the mere sharing of a drop or two of my blood. It is your willing....assistance that I want.”

There was a long, chilly silence. Maglor said at last, “How long will this...union between us endure?”

“Oh, until the next sunrise, or thereabouts. In the meantime,” she said, so casually that he almost missed it, “If you would like an earnest of....earnestness on my part, I could try to heal your hand.”

His hand. His left hand, clenched into uselessness by the savage scar that the Silmaril’s fire had burned into his palm; sinew and muscle seared and crippled so that never since had he been able to touch harp or lute or any other instrument that he had been master of in the days before the last defeat. No other promise, not of the Silmaril Itself, could have struck so easily to the heart of his weakness. The demon was still speaking.

“...I suspect that its failure to heal properly is your own doing, your heart’s own refusal. While I hold mastery of your flesh, I may be able to overbear your will in this, and force the flesh to mend as it should have.”

Unexpectedly, her presumption made him want to laugh. And weep, for the days when laughter had been easy. He realised, with shock, that he was tempted. To teach these savage Children, to defy the Powers and the Song and seek his own freedom while helping them learn to use theirs. The demon watched him, eyes steady and face serious again. Innin Adili the demon, the Grandmother of the East. He remembered her mockery before the gates of Himring, even as she yielded it up to the armies of the Noldor. He remembered the ruin she had made of it after, and the broken bodies of the dead.

“And when your use for me is done, will you slay me, as you slew the prisoners of Himring? Hísilindë and Anganarmo and Endorion. Or did you not know their names?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Do you have anything else better to do?”

He opened his mouth to reply, and realised that yet again, he had none. They looked at each other in silence. The long, slanting rays of the sun shadowed her eyes and turned her skin to gold.

“I regret those deaths,” the Grandmother said at last. “They were beneath me.” A flicker of sardonic humour returned to her face. “Perhaps you will understand that one may, in the weariness of a losing war, occasionally commit unwise and impulsive acts.”

That was unanswerable too. After a moment she said,

“I called them what they wished to be called. They did not offer me their true names and I did not take them. I promised them freedom from my service when I was done with them, and certainly....they had that. I have no interest in the names of slaves, Canafinwë Macalaurë, called Maglor.”

There was silence between them again. A sudden acrid whiff from up the slope indicated that someone had lit a dung-cake fire. By the clinking of utensils, the guards and the counsellors had given up on this being a short discussion and were having some tea. Presumably, as nomadic warriors always ready for action, they carried the makings around with them in their robes.

Maglor said, “What will become of me if I still say no?”

The Grandmother waved a hand vaguely southwards. “Over there, some many hundreds of leagues south and west, you will find a mountain range, the highest in Middle-earth. The Blue Mountains and the Misty piled one on the other would not equal them. There are Quendi there, in the valleys and the high plateaus, ancient Avari from the earliest days. Nurwë(3) rules them, as she has since first they refused the Great Journey. You may go there, if you wish. I will give you horses and gear. There you may find refuge.”

She shrugged, a minimal movement of one shoulder. “Or you may not. The Deep One sees as clearly as she must, to preserve her people through Time, and you will not hide your Doom from her.”

There was a rustle of cloth and a scrape of armour, and a guard came down the slope carrying a tray on which rested a small teapot and two cups, all of ordinary, slightly dented pewter this time. He put it down on the grass by the Grandmother’s side, bowed to them both and trotted off back to his fellows. The Grandmother poured tea into both cups and handed one to Maglor. He accepted it, since there did not seem anything else to do.

“I would still try to heal your hand if you wished. It would be a pity for Middle-earth to lack your music. And I do not think that you sing any longer.”

It was true. He had sung to the Sea for a while, doubtless starting off fresh rounds of legend and gossip throughout what was left of the Eldar in western Middle-earth. And then he had wearied of despair and turned inland, silent. What he had been seeking he did not know; any more than he knew what he had apparently found here.

The Grandmother said, “Ride the years with me, Maglor, for as long as it pleases you. I have made my people great; help me to make them glorious.”

“And my Doom?” he asked. “Would you have that fall upon your people also?”

She laughed with what sounded like honest amusement.

“This is Middle-earth, Son of Fëanor. Murder, treachery and the failure of all deeds and works are the regular way of things here. They will not even notice.”

He leaned forward, intent.

“Then you know that your realm will not endure either, Lady.”

She met his gaze and suddenly he knew that she had heard the curse that he had laid upon her, long ago, in the dusty ruins of Himring, in the darkest days of the War of Wrath. That she knew everything that he had done and been, and did not care.

“All things pass, in Middle-earth,” she said. 

“It is the nature of the world. And from the dust of fallen cities new life will spring, always and again, until the End. When I am forgotten and my people are forgotten, still their blood and mine will endure in this corner of the world.”

She grinned suddenly, sharp and bright; and again he was reminded of the past, of Caranthir in Doriath, laughing as he stood over King Dior’s body, laughing as he took his freedom and died in the arrow rain of Queen Nimloth and her guards.

“I have no certainty, you understand. Whatever promises were made to Melian’s girl, there were none made to me. Only, I do what I can. Have some more tea.”

He had some more tea. He was being asked to become the...what? Second in command and counsellor to one of the servants of darkness. A ruler of Men. No, a teacher. Or both. He wondered what Finrod would have said to such an offer. He had not the slightest notion, never having understood Finrod or been particularly close to him. His kin and kind were gone and with them all his duties and obligations to them. He was as free as one of the Eldar could ever be. He could walk into a trap (presumably this was a trap) with his eyes open if he felt like it.

There was a stir among the knot of people above them.. He looked up and saw the Grandmother’s attendant striding swiftly down the slope, grim-faced.

“Oh dear,” the Grandmother said, half-turning where she sat. “Bad news, I think. Her name is Rishuk, by the way. My personal secretary. You may trust her. She serves only me.”

The woman Rishuk reached them. She bowed to the Grandmother and began to speak in the Easterling tongue.

“In Sindarin,” the Grandmother said in that language. “So that the Lord may understand.”

Rishuk glanced at him, an unreadable look, even though the last light of the Sun was full in her face. There were faint lines at the corners of her eyes. She was not so young as she seemed.

“The Khawmu Heir is dead, Grandmother,” she said in Sindarin, in that same strong accent. “The Loidama Heiress killed him, having felt a particular insult at his offence.”

The Grandmother clicked her tongue in mild displeasure. “Tedious child. Now we will have to find her a new marriage. See to the boy’s funeral. I will attend. Ask the Haketo Lord and the Inyuzawza High Lady to see me after dinner with a list of possible candidates for the Loidama girl’s betrothal.”

“Yes, Grandmother.” Rishuk bowed to her, bowed again, less deeply, to Maglor, and went away up the slope.

“The Loidama Heiress was betrothed to the Khawmu Heir,” the Grandmother said. “Her line thinks too little and his too much, and I was hoping to get a decent compromise between the two.”

Maglor thought about that. “So you breed them, then? Like dogs or horses or Orcs?” Caranthir had tried breeding hunting cats. It had gone reasonably well, but had not caught on among the Eldar. Most hunters preferred not to have to spend time persuading their cats out of their kennels every time they felt like hunting but the cats did not. 

The Grandmother smiled the Yavanna-smile. “Not quite. I considered it in the beginning, but pure lines take too much attention to maintain and I have other things to do. I breed them for general qualities only: wits and strength and care for their people. Some day I will not be here, and then they must be strong enough to endure without me.”

He did not need to ask what her affinity had been, if not to Aulë. Nerdanel his mother had told him a little of the work of the Yavannildi outside the cultivation of the sacred grain. He had been rather proud then, that she had mastered the shaping of flesh as if it were metal, and that he and his brothers had been the fruit of her great art. Now, he could only consider it luck of the Song that Morgoth had obviously not been taking advice from the fallen among the Earthqueen’s kin, or the outcome of the War of Wrath might have been far different.

The Sun was almost below the hills and the air was cooling further. The birds on the lake were silent, but somewhere on the other side where the hills began a nightjar boomed, its call magnified by the open water. The Star was in the sky, a bright point of light, unreachably far. He wondered briefly what lost deep of the sea the other Silmaril lit now.

He was still holding his empty cup. He put it back on the tray and said “Yes.”

She did not ask for an oath, and he would not have given one. Instead she stood and held her hand out to him; small, strong, not visibly bloodstained. He took it and let her draw him to his feet without discernible effort.

“Come, then. We have much to do this evening, and I still need to see to your hand.”

He turned his back on the Star and walked with her up the slope to where the people waited.

. . . . .

 

(1) I have read The Tough Guide To Fantasyland.  
(2) Where, eons later, H P Lovecraft records that an expedition of Men dug too deep and came to a sticky end. Apart from Gothmog and Lungorthin, who are mentioned in HoME, the other names of the Balrogs are my own invention.  
(3) Mentioned somewhere in HoME as one of the names of the original leaders of the Avari, who declined to follow Elwe, Finwe and Ingwe on the Great Journey. The name is unisex, so I made it female.


End file.
